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Thursday, 10 September 2015

Creative Mess by Helen Grant

Recently I had a day which I knew was going to be unproductive. I was
getting the first thunderous rumblings of a migraine and there was no way I was
going to be able to concentrate on writing my book. So I decided to do
something useful anyway - requiring no brain power - and clear up my desk.

I say “desk”, but it is actually the oak dining table my grandmother
bought on her marriage in 1933, so it has a larger surface area than the
average desktop. In spite of this, you could hardly tell the colour of the wood
because of all the things heaped up on it. It looked like this:

It took me three hours to clear up completely. Most of it was
paperwork, which needed to be filed (groan!) in the proper places. There were
also what seemed like a trillion receipts to be sorted: business expenses to be
filed, the rest to be shredded. And then there were things like two pairs of 3Dcinema glasses, which have no sensible home anywhere. Eventually,
however, the desk looked like this:

I still had a stack of hardbacked books instead of a proper laptop
stand, but otherwise it now looked tidy and respectable – and to my mind, a bit
sterile.

I posted both of these pictures on Facebook, mainly to stop myself
chickening out of the clearing up after I’d taken the first one! What was
interesting was that instead of a chorus of “what a mess!” I suddenly had other
writers commenting, “I feel
so much better about mine now,” “Your desk is totally like my desk. I feel
relieved,” and even: “That is such a comfort. Please leave it like that.” Some
of them even posted photographs of their own
messy desks.

Now, I am prepared to
believe that there are authors out there who have beautifully ordered work
spaces with their highlighter pens lined up in rows. However, it’s clear that
many of us like to work in what one writer sweetly described as a “creative
midden.” Or maybe we don’t like it as
such, but we aren’t bothered enough about it to have a clear up. After all, we
know where everything is, right? The reference book I am using is underneath
that stack of old holiday photographs. Somewhere…

Anyway, having seen the
comments on my messy photograph, I was wallowing in a pleasurable sense of
writerly sisterhood, until I was pulled up short by a non-writing friend. “Helen,”
she commented, “you wouldn't survive a day in a corporate office. It's clear
desk every night.”

Setting aside the fact
that I did in fact survive ten whole
years in a corporate office before I became an author, this comment stung me a
bit. It seemed to imply that my messy desk was incompatible with efficiency,
productivity and professionalism. It was, in short, the sign of a deeply messy
mind.

Perhaps I’m being
oversensitive here. But as an author, you inevitably do hear a few remarks that
suggest that writing is something that just sort of happens in a very unstructured way, probably while the author is
sitting in an arty little café. Or in a hammock.

“I’d love to write a book
if I ever had the time,” for example, which suggests that the speaker is too
busy rushing about between important pieces of business to do anything as fey
as write. And don’t get me started on the people who suggest a writer gets “a
proper job”…

All this did make me think. Am I desperately disorganised and fey? No,
I don’t think I am, and nor are my fellow authors.

It takes months, sometimes years, to produce the first draft of a
novel. The first novel anyone writes (unless they are already a celebrity with
an eager public crying out for their book) is written without any guarantee
that it will ever be published and read. Eighty or ninety thousand words don’t
write themselves; that represents a huge amount of work done entirely “on
spec.” There is nobody hanging over the author’s shoulder at that point, urging
them to get on with it. The motivation comes entirely from within.

Then we come to the follow-up book, at which point there may very well
be someone hanging over the author’s shoulder, at least figuratively. The
second book is notoriously “difficult” as it has to be at least as good as the
first one and now there is a deadline, too. Nothing happens without a lot of
self discipline. The writer’s muse isn’t lolling about on a chaise longue
sipping absinthe and throwing out a couple of half-finished sentences a day; she’s
going flat out, like a hamster on a wheel. Well, mine was, anyway.

Living with mess is also a matter of priorities. Anyone who works at
home knows that on a bad day, when inspiration is lacking, it’s very easy to
get sidetracked into chores. Ten thousand words needed by Friday? Yes, but
there’s this DVD collection in desperate need of alphabetising… Get sucked into
that particular maelstrom and the book will never be written.

So I like to think that a messy desk demonstrates that the writer has
his or her priorities right. They have looked the Spirit of Domesticity in the
eyes and said, no, I have a book to write first. A messy desk is, in fact, the sign of a Higher
Calling.

5 comments:

Such a lovely resonatey post. (I know that's not a word, but who cares!) As someone who, five books in, still has to write on spec quite often, I identified with so much of this. My desk is middling-neat because I happen to be that way inclined, but it often gets messed up in the course of activity. I don't want it to look like a desk in an office, anyway. When I was teaching, it was so important to me that my study was kept for writing and never used for marking, and I still use the kitchen for sordid activities such as doing the accounts, so as not to contaminate the proper writing space.

OH I loved this post! Especially... "a messy desk demonstrates that the writer has his or her priorities right. They have looked the Spirit of Domesticity in the eyes and said, no, I have a book to write first. "

Now I have ammunition as I share a space with my husband and he is of the strict office regime of leave the desk clear every evening. The huge advantage of having everything piled up on your desk is that even though you might not find that sentence that you wanted to use, you find it when writing another story and it's often more suited to this other story!

I like this! And it has now successfully deflected me from tidying up, which was going to be my way of putting off getting down to work today…I just have to make sure that I don't end the day with a messy desk but no work done either...